Time - Asking and telling the time..
Here we look at the time and how to ask what time it is and to tell the time. First we look at how to ask the time. Then we look at how to tell the time to someone who has asked. If you want to learn all about periodic time, days of week, months of year etc then thats a different lesson, look here.
What time is it?
How do we ask what time is it? There are a couple of ways to ask this, both mean how many hours. 点 and 时 means hour and 几 mean how many. We can prefix this with 现在- xiàn zài - meaning 'now/ at this moment'. The two ways to say this are as follows:
- (现在)几点了 - (xiàn zài) jǐ diǎn le - What's the time?/ What time is it?
- (现在)几时了 - (xiàn zài) jǐ shí le
Quite simple and easy to remeber as we can see.
The time is ...
How do we reply to What is the time? Fisrtly we will look at how to say 'in the morning / afternoon / evening' etc and then we need to know how to say hours / minutes / seconds etc.
- morning - 早上 - zǎo shang
- early afternoon - 上午 - shàng wǔ
- afternoon (midday) - 中午 - zhōng wǔ
- late afternoon - 下午 - xià wǔ
- evening - 晚上 - wǎn shang
- at night - 夜裡 - yè lǐ
- hour - 小时 - xiǎo shí
- minute - 分钟 - fēn zhōng
- second (of time - 秒 - miǎo
- quater (paste the hour) - 一刻 - yí kè
- half (past the hour) - 半 - bàn
So now we know a little more time words and the numbers from 1 to 10 we can start to tell the time.
Examples ...
How do we say 1.20pm (1.20 in the afternoon)? Lets take a look and break it down. We would first say one o'clock - 一点 - yī diǎn and then say 20 minutes - 二十分 - èr shí fēn - so it becomes 一点二十分. We can prefix this with either morning/afternoon/eveing as appropriate such as 下午一点二十分.
Another example is 8.30 in the evening, we can say in the evening 晚上- wǎn shang - followed by the hour - 八点 - bā diǎn - and then the minutes. Here we can either say 30 minutes - 三十分 - sān shí fēn - or half past the our - 半 - bàn - so we have 晚上八点半 or we can say 晚上八点三十分.
Right now then, the last example. Lets say its 5.15 in the afternoon, how do we say that? Well, lets see, its late in th afternoon so we say 下午 - xià wǔ - in the afternoon. The we say 5 o'clock - 五点 - wǔ diǎn - and then we can say 15 minutes - 十五分 - shí wǔ fēn - or we can say quater past - 一刻 - yí kè. So the complete thing is 下午五点十五分 or we can say 下午五点一刻.
I hope this lesson has been useful and hope that it will serve as a reference for you. I may add other information to this page so please keep coming back. Dont forget to try the chatroom where you can meet fellow learners and make new friends. Practice your manadarin, or meet people in your area who speak chinese.
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